Although the world Postman writes about is a little dated, the book is still very thought provoking. I would highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in media's effect (and especially television) on society. ( )

It's amazing how well this book has stood the test of time. We are still amusing ourselves to death, though now we have a new medium, the Internet. Our world is even more fragmented, more information overload, but the Internet restores typography to an extent, in bite size chunks. I wonder what Postman would had thought of Twitter. ( )

Postman is right to point out that every non-natural tool of humankind, from the most sophisticated computer or medical imaging device to the alphabet and a hammer, is a piece of technology. It is rather moving to contemplate that there was a time when every non-natural thing we take for granted in our world, from simple pottery to the wheel was at one time the state-of-the-art. Postman warns us that all technologies are potentially harmful- the major specter brought by our cumulative increase in technological sophistication is an exponential increase in our capacity for destructiveness. Postman rightly posited that all technological change is "ecological, not additive": in Postman’s example of (and fascination with) television, the advent of the boob tube did not equal America plus television, it rendered an entirely different culture that buried our previous one.

It could be said with only some degree of abstraction that the wars that devastated Europe in the first half of the twentieth century were violent reactions fostered by a neurotic compulsion to deny the observations of individuals like Freud, but with different tactics. World War I was a war whose ideology was extremely old-fashioned and antiquated, and entirely untenable given the major advancements in knowledge being made with little or no awareness of the monarchies. Ironically, this war was fought with the most advanced weaponry to that time, albeit largely contained within humble trenches that magnified the destructiveness. Cultures that had failed to maturely adapt to the technological changes had gleaming tanks, massive howitzers, airplanes and machine guns utilized within a most primitive framework. Then, the next world war pushed the technology envelope far further, and couched it within fascism and national socialism, cousin ideologies that schizophrenically billed themselves as ultra-modern even as they peddled an intense nostalgia for an idealized past that never existed. The toxic combination of high technology and moribund, reactionary culture leads to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

What astonishes me is to contemplate how World War II narrowly delayed epoch-making technologies that were on tap, but shunted aside for war production. Can you imagine Hitler on television, or the death camps run by sophisticated bureaucrats with IBM mainframes and electronically-controlled railroad switching? Richard Nixon, generally regarded as an utterly uncompelling black hole of charisma, won a place in the hearts of middle America during the 1952 campaign when he came into their living room and earnestly talked about his daughters’ cocker spaniel. How much more thoroughly could Hitler have manipulated his countrymen and the world with such technological capability at his fingertips? (Or would his style have been too hot for a cool medium like television?) Conversely, what if the internet, video games, and 500-channel cable television had been mainstream in the early 1970s? Would the country have been as fixated on Watergate had their ability to tune in and drop out been comparable to ours in the present day? I believe that such exercises in counterfactual history can be more than parlor games if one considers how our world as it is now would be construed if we were not endowed with such technological advances.

I have been recently reading to quite a few articles and listening to several programs on how our modern forms of media are subtly rewiring our brains to be less thoughtful and less able to maintain an attention span longer than the length of the average image on television; that is to say, not very long. This is something that a lot of us are seeing today and wondering what to do about it. Neil Postman saw it back in 1984, and his warning should be heeded still. Because of discussions on this topic, this book was loaned to me, and I am thankful for it.

Our instinct is to turn to more intelligent programs rather than watching the fluff on television. But Postman's concern is not the content of what we are watching, but the form. It is not that the History Channel has very many interesting and educational programs. It is that even the History Channel's way of presenting them is doing more harm than good.

Contrary to what we've been taught, the medium used itself carries something with it. Television in particular has come at a high cost by the very fact that it because our source for all information for some time. Postman might write about the smart phone today, if he were alive. The situation was become more dire, since it is no longer a very heavy box in our living room that is controlling the flow of information, but a very light box in our pockets. No longer is work or the restaurant a break from media, but we are very willing to read a text at the table.

The solution here is awareness. It is rather difficult to survive in business anymore without at least a computer, if not a smart phone. These are not things we can do without anymore. But being aware of what is happening to us may change the way we approach things. Our business typically want us to be multi-taskers, jumping from project to project. This book, as well as those other articles I've been reading, have convinced me that maybe it would be very good for my brain to sit down with a book in the evening and read for a while. ( )

The dismal message of this landmark book is that, while we've kept our eye out for Orwell's world all along, we have smoothly moved into living in Huxley's. Through our own compliance, our implicit assent, and our endless desire to be entertained, we have allowed the television to behave as our soma and let happen unto us what, were it made an explicit part of the social contract, we would never have accepted. Orwell was a cartoon, while Huxley is our reality—and we don't even know it.

You may get a sense of what is meant by context-free information by asking yourself the following question: How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?

Last words

For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.

Wikipedia in English (8)

Neil Postman’s groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century. Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic media—from the Internet to cell phones to DVDs—it has taken on even greater significance. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment. It is also a blueprint for regaining control of our media, so that they can serve our highest goals.

Examines the effects of television on American society, arguing that media messages, which were generally coherent, serious, and rational when in print, have become shriveled and absurd due to the medium of television.